They said the sky once had color.
Blue…the old scriptures claimed though such a shade no longer existed in the memory of humankind. The heavens now hung heavy and gray, an ocean of ash reflecting nothing but its own exhaustion. Beneath it stood the Archivist the last custodian of remembrance burdened by memory in a world that had long forgotten how to remember.
He walked among the carcasses of cities…his feet sinking into dust that had once been marble. Every ruin whispered like a half buried confession; every echo begged to be recorded. His task was simple, cruelly so to collect names. The names of the dead, the vanished, and the never born. Those who once lived in flesh, and those who existed only as whispers between dreams.
No one knew who had appointed him.
Perhaps it was Death, amused by the irony of making a mortal its historian. Or perhaps the Oldest Dream, unwilling to fade quietly into myth, had shaped him to preserve what even gods would forget. Some say the Archivist was neither man nor phantom merely the last echo of an unfinished thought, given form to outlast silence itself.
Each night, he lit a single candle and whispered the names he had gathered that day. The wind answered, carrying the syllables upward to a place beyond knowing. Sometimes, in the distance, he saw faint silhouettes watching him not human, not divine, merely aware. The Watchers. Witnesses of endings. They neither spoke nor approached; they simply observed, as though ensuring the cycle continued.
The Archivist once believed himself immortal. The absence of hunger and sleep had convinced him so. But centuries, stretched thin across millennia, began to devour him. His outline grew faint. The candlelight passed through his hands as though through glass. Memory was consuming its keeper.
There came a night colder than memory itself. He stumbled upon a mirror among the ruins its silver surface unbroken, impossibly clean. He looked upon it and saw nothing. No reflection. No light. Only the trembling echo of his voice dissolving into the dark.
"Who remembers the one who remembers?" he whispered.
The silence was immense. The candle trembled, its flame gasping against the dark. He clutched his final parchment a list of names already fading into white and felt the weight of every forgotten soul pressing on his chest.
"Let me be forgotten," he murmured, closing his eyes.
And for a moment, the wind stilled. The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then softly the air stirred. A whisper threaded through the dust, gentle but unable to be ignored, like the sigh of an ancient sea.
"Not yet."
The Archivist's eyes opened. The wind moved again, curling around him, carrying countless faint voices the murmurs of the lost, the broken, the never named.
"Tell them once more," the wind said.
"Let their stories be heard before the dark forgets us all."
The candle's flame rekindled, though he had not touched it. The parchment grew warm in his hand. And for the first time in a thousand years, the Archivist bowed his head not in despair, but in obedience.
He gathered his quills and ink, sat beneath the ruin of a shattered spire, and began to write.
"Archive of the Endless Record One."